


Walk Light

by BelowBedlam



Series: Verity [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 09:47:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4782899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BelowBedlam/pseuds/BelowBedlam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short pieces on Kimani Trevelyan's time as an apostate before the Conclave. Spans between 9:40 and 9:41 Dragon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gossamer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Free of the Circle, Kimani fights the urge to return home.

 

> _**Gossamer (noun) a fine, filmy cobweb seen on grass or bushes or floating in the air in calm weather, especially in autumn.** _ **  
> **
> 
>  

This is not the first time she’s seen her mother since the Circle, only the first time in twenty years Asha has been close enough for Kimani to touch. Their reunion could be as simple as crossing the road and jumping the gate yet it is still a hope, gossamer thin, too scant to be anything but a thought in a desperate woman’s head. And still she remains.

Kimani shivers as morning chills her to the marrow, the dewy leaves of the bushes she hides in like slivers of ice to numb what the air has not. Across the street and through wrought-iron fences lined with wilting vines, Asha Lia dozes on her veranda. Her hair curls over her knees in delicate locs, adorned in gold wire and jeweled bands. Her brown skin pales only slightly in the cold, dark and rich in protest of wet Ostwick autumn, darker where the flush of too much warmth heats her cheeks. Her legs are bare and surely goosebumped, but she’s wrapped in a fur Kimani thinks she recognizes. It is altogether a foreign sight; if Kimani didn’t know the house, she might second-guess this woman with her mother’s face.

In the Fade Asha is always alert, always fearless, simmering with her long-subdued magic. Kimani has little memory of her mother at rest. Now, she carves this image into the stone of her private memory, the corner she does not walk in Dreams. Some things cannot be touched, for her own sake.

Asha stirs, and Kimani shrinks back into the bushes until the leaves obscure her vision. The sun has started its crawl into the sky and she only has so much time before the distance put between her and the Templars dwindles thin as the hope of crossing the road. Or jumping the fence. Or hugging her mother without demons drooling in the Fade’s mist. Too thin.

Silently, Kimani slips away, pulling the hood of her stolen cloak lower over the carefully-inked black of her hair. She must make it to the docks by evening and gain place on a ship by nightfall, lest her hunters overtake her, and be sailing south across the Waking Sea by tomorrow morning. Kimani will not allow her freedom to sour in the Marches.

 _Freedom,_  she thinks, crossing into the growing frenzy of a morning market _, is supposed to feel a little better than this._


	2. Pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kimani lands in Ferelden, unable to keep herself whole. Or sober. (TW Drug use)

There is consistently less of her, worn and blown and chipped away; she’s lighter with every footfall of thin shoes against frosted road, so light she barely registers her ship landing on some Ferelden port. One of the deckhands is far younger than her and smitten; she can’t understand why she doesn’t feel the warmth of his smile when it’s as stark as the sun or his gentle hands guiding her off of the vessel.

This dock is much like what she’d left in the Marches; gray and foul, full of dirty sailors and fishmongers slapping at white-bellied carcasses until they danced in tune to the call of prices. What she would do for a fresh fish.

“Marian, stay here, I’ll come back for you,” He promises, sprinting off at his master’s call. Kimani frowns. She could have picked a better name than Marian. She could have remembered telling him her name to begin with.

She sighs and forfeits another sliver of herself. At least she is across the Sea. At least, the young man would find her a meal before she broke his winged, fluttering heart.

—

“Meet me at midnight. Alone.”

“Alone?” The blonde is too young to be talking to such a character even if she hadn’t been an apostate. Her haircut is uneven and severe but her dark eyes are wide, more accustomed to the monotony of her Circle walls than anything she’s seen so far. Kimani watches the man she speaks to. He is too sure of himself to notice a sullen, brown woman in the corner as he leans onto his table and nods solemnly at the girl.

“Unless you have other friends in need of help. It has to be hard for you mages, never been out and about. You’re just people, we know that. And we want to help.” Kimani thinks he sounds like his tongue is forked and his eyes blink wrong ways-up but this girl, this girl doesn’t recognize. He’d stay fat on her for days.

Ferelden has been a nightmare. She should never have come, should have left back on the ship with the young man who is so far gone in her memory she only sees the the fuzzy, dark outline of what he might have been.

The blonde mage tells him it will only be her and that she’ll meet him, clasping his hand earnestly in thanks. He doesn’t outright scowl like the Templars do; that has to be the reason she misses the flinch of his beady green eyes when she touches him, that mad dash of fear. Kimani takes a throat-bursting chug of ale and sets her mug down firmly as the snake slithers away, winding through a busying tavern. The blonde mage sits back, dazed. She barely startles when Kimani takes the snake’s place.

“That man is going to get you killed or worse.” She murmurs, laying both hands palms-down on the tabletop. Her hands are dry and dingy, her knuckles bruised, but she pulls past the Veil so the mage can feel magic reach from her fingertips, warm and friendly.

“You’re.” She says it like a complete thought. Kimani nods.

“You’re young.”

“Um. Yes. I’m sixteen.”

“Have you been Harrowed?” A weak shake of her head. Kimani smiles sympathetically. She nods backwards towards her booth, turning her palms up to the mage when she hesitates.

“At the very least, you know I’m not going to give you to Templars.”

—

Good things come with sunrise. Usually. They’ve been fairly lucky as the months pass. Kimani watches the sky blend colors in ways she never could grasp on paper as she presses blood lotus petals into her pipe. Salise, the blonde mage, still sleeps near the low fire. She would probably sleep until Kimani woke her; the poor thing was nearly possessed in the night and now had half of Kimani’s nesomni cache in her belly. There was no way of knowing if it would actually work on a normal mage, but they would try. 

Before last night, Kimani hadn’t walked in dreams since Ostwick; She hadn’t touched another’s dreams for longer. She wakes with a white-hot headache, taking her blood lotus with a dash of water hyssop and elfroot to actually manage the pain. She would float only a little, soles grazing the ground. Her pipe’s end glows marigold orange when she inhales, thinking; she’d needed another mage. A brave, responsible mage. Then, they could have Harrow the child and been done with it.

“We’re all free,” Kimani muses aloud, smoke unfurling from her tongue like new leaves. “And we’re all scared shitless.”

“Enchanter,” Salise calls, coughing. Kimani is at her side in an instant; Her being up so soon is an interesting sign.

“You may call me Kimani, I’ve told you,” She says, smoothing the girl’s corn silk hair. “And you can rest longer, if you like. The Conclave is not until tomorrow. You’re not missing a thing.” But Salise has carved edges in the smooth ivory of herself these last months. She shakes her head, wincing.

“Enchanter,” she says, “you have to tell me what happened in the night. Please. You’re the one that told me I must see and take in everything, I must strive to know everything to my best knowledge.” She grips Kimani’s shoulders, pulling herself up. “Like you say, the Conclave isn’t until tomorrow. Tell me.” 

Even with Salise on her heels, Kimani hasn’t been able to keep hold of any more of herself. A breeze here, a scuffle there, and she relinquishes some bit of what she’d grown in her Circle. It should be a good thing, making way for new growth in herself, but it was slow going. Bad soil.

“Well. You might not like all I have to say.” she begins, dragging on her pipe, “Or you might not believe it. But it’s true, even if they don’t teach it in the Circles.”

At least she can sow some sort of understanding in the girl, just in case the Conclave is shit and they’re back on the road again by nightfall, leaving bits and pieces in their wake.


End file.
